Competitive Advantage: Microsoft's Post-Wintel Strategy

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Competitive Advantage: Microsoft's Post-Wintel Strategy

Reading my RSS and Twitter feeds Tuesday night, I turned to a tech writer friend and said, "the Wintel Era just ended, and half of these people are fighting over whether demo tablets should have fans."

If you don't know, "Wintel" is the shorthand for Intel processors plus Microsoft's Windows operating system. Working together, Microsoft and Intel broke IBM's hold on computing, used standards and interoperability to make "PC-compatible" a thing, relegated Apple to a tiny fraction of the market (until it, too, adopted Intel processors), and then defined and dominated the personal computing industry — or at least its desktop and laptop portions — for the better part of the past twenty years.

Now, Wintel as a platform hasn't exactly ended. Windows 8, like older versions of Windows that will likely remain with us for decades, will still run on Intel and compatible x86 processors. But Windows 8 will also run on ARM's alternate system-on-a-chip architectures. These chips have become nearly as dominant in mobile and ultraportable machines as Intel's are in traditional laptops and desktops. Windows' ARM compatibility was first announced in January, but is news again because of Microsoft's continued unveiling of Windows 8 details (including a full developer preview, already downloaded 500,000 times) at its BUILD developer conference.

ARM-optimized builds will make it easier to run Windows 8 on tablets, or in any other form factor where power consumption and mobility are at a premium. Between Intel and ARM, Windows will really be able to run just about everywhere, in any kind of form factor, without much drop-off in features or performance. Anyways, that's the target and the hope.

Intel will in turn partner with Google to pair Intel x86 processors with Android. This itself isn't a surprise — Intel had to make a move to more mobile operating systems sooner or later, and Android is probably the most popular and easily adaptable mobile OS in the world right now.

Still, because Windows 8's and Android's roots are now growing into overlapping territory, this means Intel and Microsoft are both now openly teaming up with direct competitors to the other Wintel partner. It's pragmatism, sure; but it's also yet another signal that the old rules don't hold any longer. GigaOm's Ryan Kim keys in on this in "Microsoft, Intel chart separate paths in the post-PC era":

"The fact is that mobile devices, wireless broadband and the cloud are changing what we expect computers to do," Kim writes. "And the old paradigm of powerful laptops and desktops leading the way increasingly doesn’t make as much sense with consumers, who are embracing these new computing models."

Nor have we exhausted how those new models will continue to evolve. Two years ago, before the iPad became a smash success, the only industry executives openly breathless in their enthusiasm about tablet computing were, ironically, at Microsoft.

Two years from now, it's perfectly likely that yet another form factor still may be the personal computing and consumer electronics growth market du jour. Google and Intel first teamed up, as Kim notes, to work on Google TV. Microsoft jumped from Intel's to a competitor's chips (IBM's PowerPC) when it moved from the original Xbox to Xbox 360. Windows 8 arguably borrows as much from Xbox 360 — including Xbox Live's entire gaming and media platform — as it does Windows Phone 7.

It's not just about smartphones; it's not just about mobile. It's about a broad range of devices, some of which may not exist yet, but might exist as early as Windows 8's proper launch in 2012. Tablet computing might be the first market where Windows + ARM and Android + x86 cross paths, but it won't be the last.

This is why focusing on tablets alone, and specifically putting a future Windows 8 tablet head-to-head against a right-now Apple iPad, is just a mistake. But of course, that's what most tech writers are doing.

If it was going to be a competition between Win8 and iPad, then Apple's defenders were bound to bristle. Daring Fireball's John Gruber struck back at Thurrott:

The demo tablet hardware from Samsung they’re showing it on (and giving to Build attendees) is a Core i5 Intel-based PC replete with a fan. Spec-wise these units are much more like MacBook Airs than iPads. Presumably actual shipping iPad-competing Windows 8 tablets will use low-power mobile CPUs — be they ARM, Atom, whatever, just so long as they get iPad-caliber long battery life and low temperatures.

How will Windows 8 run on such hardware? When will they actually ship? How many as-yet-unannounced iPad 3s will Apple have sold by the time the first Windows 8 tablet hits stores? (Not to mention the many tens of millions of iPad 2s Apple will sell in just the next quarter alone.)

It’s all in the future. All potential, nothing actual.

To his credit, Gruber also wrote that "[o]ne of the implications of Microsoft’s everything-except-phones-in-one-OS strategy for Windows 8 is that it could utterly fail as an iPad competitor, but still be a successful OS." But for Gruber, that means "good and popular for traditional desktop and notebook PCs — where by 'good' let’s say we mean 'better than Windows 7' — but doesn’t gain any traction at all in the tablet market."

In a follow-up post, Gruber comes back again to the issue of the demo tablet's onboard fan: "An iPad runs for double-digit hours on a single charge with a lightweight battery and never even gets warm let alone hot," because it doesn't permit background processes and other applications to gobble up resources the way Windows and Mac operating systems do. This is why "Windows 8 with the full Windows desktop will never be an iPad rival. But a version of Windows 8 with nothing but Metro looks like an excellent design for an iPad rival."

It's fun to kid around about this stuff. Technology fans, like sports fans, like to cheer and boo, and to tease and taunt each other. One important way of writing from the user's perspective is writing from the fan's perspective. Tech blogs do this kind of opinion journalism very, very well.

There's also a definite point to be made about which tradeoffs are most appropriate for each form factor. This is true for hardware and software, both at the point of interface and under the hood. A year ago, I wrote "Why ‘Gorilla Arm Syndrome’ Rules Out Multitouch Notebook Displays." Stapling two things together that work rarely results in a third thing that works.

But I don't think that's what Windows 8 is doing. I definitely don't think they're trying to make a tablet just to make a tablet. It's an OS that embraces a greater variety of form factors than ever before, but also abstracts from them. My friend Navneet Alang gets very close to spelling this out for The Toronto Standard:

To Microsoft, then, it’s not that post-PC meant the end of the personal computer at all. It’s that the idea of a computer as either a fixed, stable thing that sits on your desk at home or your lap—or in your hands as tablet or phone—is much less important than the computer becoming a virtual notion, constantly in flux. A tablet computer can be held in your hands to check the news, but then be propped up, connected to a mouse and keyboard and then be used to type out a long document. It’s computing as an thing you do, not a thing you hold.

I say "almost" because grand as it is, I still think this is almost too small and too tablet-centered a vision. I guarantee you that right now at Apple, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, et al aren't grinning to themselves and saying, "boy, are we glad we figured out this smartphone and tablet thing! Let's just keep making all of these products marginally better for the next ten years!"

Neither are Microsoft's hardware OEMs. The smart ones aren't, anyways. They're trying to figure out better computing in televisions, cars, kiosks, e-readers, industrial terminals, game consoles (static and portable), and in dozens of other applications and form factors that go well beyond the increasingly dated "three screens and a cloud" formula. You can believe that smart people at Intel and Android are looking at these spaces too, and trying to figure out where they can contribute.

Now that the Wintel Era is ending, it'd be a mistake to think that we would just replace it with a different model, embracing a multitouch-driven smartphone OS on an ARM chip as the only variation worth pursuing. Ask Hewlett-Packard how that worked out for them.

It's time to embrace a new eclecticism. It's time to recognize that Apple and Microsoft are both making the best use of their strengths and resources as they appraise them. Hmm, should I base this new product on the platform where I'm fighting to eke out market share point by point, or the one where I'm clearly dominant? Apple went one way, Microsoft another, but they both answered that question in exactly the same way.

It's time to accept that we don't know where this is going — even in 2011, let alone in 2012 and beyond. As Technologizer's Harry McCracken writes, the verdict isn't in. That's true about much more than just Windows 8.

The big ideas in next-generation computing — low power, multitouch, voice, and other kinds of rich local interface, moving seamlessly across and between and joining multiple devices, with computing and storage increasingly performed on or in sync with the cloud — are so much bigger than which tablet you'll want to buy next summer, or how it (and you) will keep cool.